Fujitsu has released its Future Insights Global Digital Transformation Survey Report 2019, which highlights the results of its survey conducted among 900 CxOs and decision-makers at large and mid-sized companies spread across different industries in nine countries, including Australia. With this survey, Fujitsu aims to understand the state of their digital transformation journeys with regard to AI and other advanced technologies, and to clarify how business leaders around the world perceive the concept of "trust", an increasingly urgent theme in recent years. The third iteration of this survey also revealed the six success factors in digital transformation initiatives and the importance of organisational abilities such as leadership. The survey additionally takes an in-depth look at trust toward online data and decisions made by AI or a person. Fujitsu will ultimately draw on these findings to accelerate its work with customers in advancing their digital transformation initiatives to achieve greater trust in business and society.

What do we mean by pragmatism? It's a good description for what we are seeing in a market that carried ambitious strategies into 2018 but ran afoul of internal headwinds. Don't get me wrong, the external market is neither easy nor forgiving -- the combined forces of empowered customers, hyper-digital advancement, and new and hostile competitive fronts are not going away. But forced pragmatism results from issues related to allocation and readiness: Did leadership allocate the political and real capital necessary to overcome organizational inertia? And was the organization ready for this kind of strategic upheaval?

SAP SE have published research findings from a study commissioned by SAP and conducted by leading industry analyst Forrester Consulting. The report suggests that intelligent technologies are critical for supporting digital transformation in the enterprise. SAP commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the adoption of intelligent technologies and how they're supporting digital transformation. To explore this topic, Forrester conducted an online survey of 747 respondents. The respondents are all digital transformation and intelligent technology decision makers from consumer products, discrete manufacturing, retail, and utilities companies.

Every business must become a digital business. In the era of multiple innovation, where businesses have shifted from exploring emerging technologies to implementations of disruptive technologies like mobile, social, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT), the digital playing field will eventually even out. According to the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 research report -- based on a survey of over 6,000 business and IT executives, companies will need to find their competitive edge in this new'post-digital' era. Also: What is AI? Everything you need to know The Accenture Technology Vision 2019 report was written by Paul Daugherty, Accenture's chief technology and innovation officer (CTIO) and leader of the company's Technology Innovation and Ecosystem group, Marc Carrel-Billiard, Accenture's global senior managing director of Accenture Labs, the company's dedicated R&D organization, and Michael Biltz, Managing Director of Accenture's annual Strategic Technology Visioning efforts. Daugherty is also the co-author of'Human Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age AI'.

Mechanical engineering is the backbone of Germany's industry. But will it stay that way? What does digital transformation mean for engineering companies, and what role does the service business play? We spoke with Bianca Illner, Managing Director of Management Services at VDMA. Peter Gaide is a freelance writer and the editor in chief of Transformation Beats.